The Importance of Religious Displays for Belief Acquisition and Secularization

Abstract

Both the sociology and the cognitive science of religion seek to explain the acquisition of religious beliefs. In this article, I offer an account of the acquisition and distribution of religious beliefs using the findings of both fields. In the process, I seek to illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary dialogue for improving our understanding of religion and its absence. More specifically, I present a prima facie case—based on existing work in the social and cognitive sciences, exploratory online surveys, and participant observation—that witnessing actions attesting to religious claims is one of the most crucial variables determining whether or not an individual will explicitly believe such claims. Further, I argue that the connection between action and belief can help produce an improved account of secularization and non-theism, defined here as the lack of explicit belief in the existence of non-physical agents.

Notes

1. See Jonathan Lanman for a defence of the scientific legitimacy of the concept of belief.

2. Both ‘religion’ and ‘supernatural’ have been criticized as betraying a strong Western bias. Pascal Boyer has introduced the term ‘non-physical agent’ to be more precise about the type of agency under discussion and potentially escape the terminological criticism (Boyer and Bergstrom). Such agents include gods, ancestor spirits, ghosts, and the variety of other non-physical agents populating the religious traditions of the world.

3. Norris and Inglehart measure existential security according to various scales of societal health, including the United Nation's Human Development Index, the GINI coefficient for income inequality, per capita GDP, adult illiteracy rate, AIDS cases per 100,000 people, infant mortality and child mortality rates, doctors per 100,000 people, and life expectancy at birth (62).

4. According to available data, the Scandinavian nations are the least religious nations on earth (Zuckerman, “Atheism”, Society).

5. In the well-known study by Walster, Aronson and Abrahams, researchers found that, after exposing participants to testimonies by felons and prosecutors about whether the courts should (or should not) have more or less power to punish criminals, felons who argued that courts should have more power were more effective in persuading participants of their point of view than either felons who argued that the courts should have less power or prosecutors who argued that courts should have more power.

6. Numerous studies in the sociology of religion in the West point to the importance of parental socialization for religious belief and affiliation (Sherkat; Ozorak; Francis and Gibson) contra Judith Harris, who argues that peers have much more influence on an individual's thought and behavior. It is an open and interesting question whether the special importance of parents discussed by sociologists of religion would hold in hunter-gatherer societies, where children spend less time in the exclusive company of their immediate genetic kin.

7. Questions concerning parents or guardians included, among others: How frequently did your parent(s) attend religious services? Did your parent(s) fast or make other sacrifices for religious reasons? If yes, did they follow through with their fasting/sacrifices? To what extent did your parent(s) display emotion (e.g. elation, sadness) in response to religious ideas or in religious services? Questions concerning groups included: Did the leaders of this organization/congregation/camp make sacrifices such as celibacy, fasting, funding activities with their own money? To what extent did group members engage in charitable work together? To what extent did group members show emotion (e.g. elation, sadness) in services/meetings? (Readers interested in having a complete list of the questions and further details about the methodology may contact the author.)

8. Social psychologist Ziva Kunda has described motivated reasoning as the process by which motivation and desire affect reasoning through “reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes—that is strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs”. When motivation is to arrive at accurate beliefs, these biases are minimized. When motivation is to defend existing beliefs, cognitive processes are biased to deliver conclusions which are in line with these beliefs.

9. Different teams of experimental psychologists have come to similar results about the nature of threat and in-group commitment, whether the threat is conceived of as loss of personal control (Kay et al.) or an increase in uncertainty (Hogg, “Subjective”, “Self-categorization”, “Uncertainty”; van den Bos; van den Bos, Amejide and van Gorp).

10. Many Israeli women regularly recite Psalms as part of their religious practices, although it is not mandated by Jewish law. According to Sosis's interview data, Israeli women view psalm recitation as one of the most important actions to take in order to improve matzav or ‘situation’ and, specifically, to protect themselves from a terrorist attack (“Pigeons”).

11. Some of the phenomena classified as ‘superstitious’ and as products of uncertainty mentioned here, including prayer and psalm recitation, might also be conceived of as ‘attachment’ behaviors. Lee Kirkpatrick and Peer Granqvist, Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver have argued that individuals’ relationships with non-physical agents frequently constitute attachment relationships (Bowlby) and that, when threatened, individuals attempt to become close to the attachment figures through prayer and ritual.

12. Even commitment to secularism and atheism is relatively weak in Sweden and Denmark in comparison to the United States and the United Kingdom: while the majority are non-theistic, very few self-identify as ‘atheist’ or join specifically atheist organizations, seeing membership in such group as indicating an unattractively strong stance against religious beliefs and values.